Thinking of healthier lifestyle? Must be Monday

Everyone has his or her reasons for not liking Monday, but your doctor can give you one more. Monday can kill you. You’re more likely to have a heart attack, stroke, or worse on Mondays.

How does your body know to be sick, when Monday is entirely human-made? While this question has received substantial attention, the Monday campaigns have gone against the grain, arguing that Monday is also good for your health, being the perfect day to take on healthy habits.

These efforts merit applause, and hundreds of schools and restaurants participate in “Meatless Monday” as well as their other Monday focused health promotion programs. But do people actually think “healthy” on Monday apart from these efforts?

Only recently has it been possible to address this question thanks to the emergence of data comprised of anonymous digital footprints left online. My colleague Ben Althouse and I have been monitoring these kinds of web data to understand the populations’ thoughts and behaviors, and public health.

Working alongside the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Mondays Campaigns we began using these data to understand Mondays by monitoring the proportion of Google searches originating in the United States that included the word “healthy,” such as “healthy diet,” relative to all searches.

Since 2005, there was a clear pattern: Healthy searches spike early in the week. For example, there were 30 percent more healthy searches on Monday than for the rest of the week, with searches ranging from 1 percent (Wednesday) to 90 percent (Saturday) higher.

You might be wondering do such percentages even matter? In 2012, Google was searched about 1.2 trillion times. As a result, even 1 percent can be indicative of millions of searches, and therefore millions of instances when people are thinking about improving their health.

The next logical question is: what’s driving Monday spikes in healthy searches? Is the media simply encouraging us to think “healthy” on Monday?

Luckily, that is easy to test. Our group, along with Mark Dredze, estimated the frequency of news articles on Google News and postings by advertising accounts on Twitter encouraging others to be healthy. Neither spike on Monday. In fact, both are spiking on days when healthy searches are declining, like Wednesday.

This suggests Monday spikes in healthy thinking are not a top-down, media driven, phenomena, but a bottom-up one. Something in us must be driving Monday spikes in healthy thinking.

Knowing this, we must dig a little deeper. How universal is healthy thinking on Monday?

First, we can assess how ubiquitous Monday spikes are across health topics. Early week spikes in online searches were identified across a host of outcomes, including weight loss and quitting smoking (the two leading causes of death). For example, “South Beach diet” or “best exercise routine” and hundreds of other searches are highest early in the week, mostly on Monday. Of note, these patterns are not common outside health.

Second, we can assess if these patterns in healthy thinking also apply globally and to the non-English speaking world. The patterns in English appear to be largely replicated in languages across the globe. For example, global Google searches for quitting smoking in Chinese, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish appear to spike on Monday. Out of 30 comparisons (Monday compared to the other six days for five languages) quit smoking searches were higher on Monday 28 times and only smaller one time.